As the total number of comments posted on our website now exceeds 40,000 a day, it’s perhaps not surprising that complaints about moderation are increasing. Observer readers often seem unaware of community standards designed to keep the party polite or are offended that their posts have been removed when they believe they have not broken any rules.
I have noticed an increase in appeals from readers claiming their contributions have been excised in what they see as some sort of conspiracy to silence them. It can be a time-consuming exercise to ask the moderators to return to the thread and justify their decisions, only to find that readers, anxious to get their point across, have simply ignored the guidelines.
I addressed this in a column last November when several wrote – or Tweeted – that their posts had been removed under a profile of Lord Saatchi. They accused the moderators of trying to skew the debate and suggested the author of the profile had intervened in the moderation process. I was able to tell them firmly that no writer can influence the moderators and that their comments had been removed on the advice of our lawyers.
So, no conspiracy to silence anyone; no attempt to skew the debate. Instead, a cool adherence by the moderators to the community standard that states: “We will remove any content that may put us in legal jeopardy, such as potentially libellous or defamatory postings.” As the profile author noted: “There is an increasing tendency to jump to hysterical conclusions in the heady righteousness of the Twittersphere.”
Duty of care
Two months later, moderation underneath another Observer piece caused a further wave of protest. The feature concerned the shocking story of a woman’s torment during six years of forced prostitution. Concerns over the veracity of her story were raised several times by readers, only to find their comments removed. One wrote: “My first post has completely vanished: it expressed concern that previous posts raising questions about the journalistic underpinnings of the piece had been deleted and raised the issue of trust. I am particularly unhappy about that post being taken down without a placeholder noting its removal. I always find the total deletion of a post troubling: transparency surely demands that readers can see if the moderators have removed a number of posts. Looking back through the comments thread now, I see gaping holes where a number of people politely challenged the narrative.”
I asked the senior community moderator manager why his team had removed so many. “We are very sensitive when an article is about sexual abuse,” he replied. “We have a duty of care towards the victim, which means we allow a less robust examination of their experiences than we would on a less personally sensitive and triggering subject.” He added that the guidelines warn that when a comment or post is removed, it is often necessary to delete subsequent posts that refer to or quote from the original removed comment, to preserve some notion of conversational thread. In such cases, not every deletion will be marked individually as this then clutters the comments.
Complaints
Complaints about moderation (usually unjustified) occupied just some of the 3,900 email exchanges I had with readers last year. Others concerned our coverage of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; the correct naming of Islamic State; women in sport (again); updating corrections; unfair treatment of private railway companies; suicide coverage, and – always – plain matters of accuracy.
Fact checking
Readers are quick to tell us when we have our facts wrong. Once verified, it’s a reasonably simple matter to correct and footnote the online version of a story but it’s a whole week to wait for a correction to appear in print, something that seems increasingly anachronistic in a digital world. Sometimes, complaints will take months to investigate and resolve. A Magazine piece ran in November but it was not until March that I was able to write a column about it. The piece had alleged that British troops had fired on Greek protesters in Athens in December 1944, just days after they had been fighting on the same side. Academics protested and it was not until Professor Andre Gerolymatos held a conference on the subject at his university in British Columbia that he could conclude that the witnesses the paper had spoken to were probably misled. The paper’s mistake was to report those recollections as fact, rather than attribute the assertions directly to those who were there on that fateful day.
Spreading the word
Last year, I reported on efforts by the Organization of News Ombudsmen to establish a training course for new readers’ editors. At our Cape Town conference it was agreed that I should seek funding to begin this training in Africa, as new appointments look likely in Kenya and Uganda. I’m currently talking to academics in Nairobi with the aim of starting the course there.
